The allegation was passed on to reporters for The Los Angeles Times and The New York Times in the waning days of the 1992 Presidential campaign. Regarding it as the kind of toxic waste traditionally dumped just before Election Day, both newspapers passed on the story -- that a nursing-home executive had been sexually assaulted in 1978 by Bill Clinton, then the Attorney General of Arkansas.

The rumor persisted in the shadowlands of the Internet, even after a sworn denial by Juanita Broaddrick, the woman involved. Mrs. Broaddrick reversed herself last spring, during questioning by investigators for the independent counsel Kenneth W. Starr. Last month, during the impeachment process, she decided to make the assault charges public in an interview with NBC News. Then she chafed because the interview was not broadcast.

Now, Mrs. Broaddrick has found a different avenue to tell her story, giving several news organizations, including The New York Times, an account of an encounter with Mr. Clinton in an Arkansas hotel room. The interviews represent the first time she has spoken openly about an accusation first made public last March. In the interview, she describes a scene in which Mr. Clinton invited himself to her room and then attacked her.

President Clinton's personal lawyer, David A. Kendall, has strenuously denied the accusation. ''Any allegation that the President assaulted Mrs. Broaddrick more than 20 years ago is absolutely false,'' Mr. Kendall said in a statement released on Friday. ''Beyond that, we're not going to comment.'' The White House declined further comment yesterday.

The problems with Mrs. Broaddrick's accusation are obvious. There is no physical evidence to verify it. No one else was present during the alleged encounter in a Little Rock hotel room nearly 21 years ago. The hotel has since closed. And Mrs. Broaddrick denied the encounter in an affidavit in January 1998 in the Paula Jones case, in which she was known only as ''Jane Doe No. 5.'' Through all those years, she refused to come forward. When pressed by the Jones lawyers, she denied the allegation. And now, she has recanted that denial.

Her accusation has long been fodder for Mr. Clinton's legal and political opponents; lawyers for Ms. Jones earned a stern judicial rebuke last spring when they made Mrs. Broaddrick's name public in a legal pleading based on unsubstantiated hearsay accounts.

But despite the problems with the accusation, it became part of the background noise of the impeachment process in Congress, pushed by conservative House Republicans even after Mr. Starr made only a glancing reference to it in a supplement to his report.

At least one senior Republican House investigator, pushing hard for the President's removal, told some undecided Republicans that Mrs. Broaddrick's story would probably become public and that they would look bad if they voted against impeachment, two House Republicans said. While it appears that the allegation swayed few, if any, votes in the House or Senate, it hardened opinion against the President among some of the dozen or so Representatives who were led to materials on the case in a secure room in the Capitol, Republican officials said. In some cases, reading the Broaddrick files ended the representatives' qualms and made them feel at peace with their decisions to support impeachment, the officials said.

Representative Christopher Shays, Republican of Connecticut, said he was shaken by the materials and at one point decided to vote for impeachment but in the end changed his mind.

''The material I saw was, if true, shocking, disgusting and left a big pit in your stomach,'' said Mr. Shays, who become one of the few Republicans to vote against impeachment. ''But it did not directly relate to the articles of impeachment, which is why it didn't see the light of day.''

A Story Illustrates How the Press Works

The shadowy, subterranean path the allegation traveled also illustrates the mechanics of the national media after a year of White House sexual scandal.

Never homogenous, the national press is divided in ever-smaller slivers, with smaller outlets on the Internet and cable television sometimes overwhelming the slower and more sober judgments of mainstream news organizations.

Now some news outlets report on the investigations of other news organizations even before they are published.

From her home in Van Buren, Ark., Mrs. Broaddrick said in an interview this week that she had decided to air her charges in the NBC interview because she was exasperated by erroneous descriptions of the encounter on the Internet and on a cable television talk show last December. She was contemptuous of the national tabloid, The Star, which in December raised the possibility that she and her husband had been paid to keep silent.

''People were talking about my life and they didn't know what they were talking about,'' she said. ''It was so hurtful, to think anyone would think we would take money.''

Mrs. Broaddrick, who is now 56 and the prosperous owner of a nursing home and an extended-care facility, gave her account to The New York Times over the telephone. It is the following:

When Mr. Clinton came through Van Buren on a campaign stop in April of 1978, she approached him and discussed nursing homes. He told her that if she were ever in Little Rock, they could talk further.

She attended a conference in Little Rock a few weeks later with her friend and employee Norma Rogers, then the director of nursing at Mrs. Broaddrick's nursing home. She telephoned Mr. Clinton, she said, and agreed to meet him in a coffee shop. But when he phoned back, he said he wanted to avoid some reporters and suggested meeting in her room.

Shortly after he arrived, she said, Mr. Clinton moved close to her and tried to kiss her, succeeding only in biting her upper lip, hard. Then, she said, he forced her down on to the bed and had intercourse with her.

''I was so totally surprised, totally shocked,'' she said.

Afterward, she said, he got up from the bed, put on his sunglasses, and while walking to the door, said, ''You'd better put some ice on that,'' referring to her bruised and bitten lip. Then he left.

Two friends, Susan Lewis and Norma Rogers, said she told them of the incident at the time. Ms. Rogers, then the director of the Mrs. Broaddrick's nursing home, said she entered the room and found Mrs. Broaddrick crying and in ''a state of shock.'' Her upper lip was puffed out and blue, and appeared to have been hit. ''She told me he forced himself on her, forced her to have intercourse,'' Mrs. Rogers said in an interview earlier this week.

Mrs. Broaddrick said she decided not to see a doctor about her lip, because the swelling went down.

At the time of the incident, Mrs. Broaddrick said, she was having an affair with a married man, Dave Broaddrick, who has been her husband for the past 18 years. She told both Mr. Broaddrick and Mrs. Rogers not to reveal what she had told them, because she was convinced no one would believe her.

''Even though I was a respected businesswoman, what was I doing in a hotel room with the Attorney General?'' she said. ''No, I never even considered coming forward.''

A Slow Leak Grows in Strength

Mrs. Broaddrick had told a few friends her account, but it had not seemed to leak out until she was approached during the 1992 campaign by Philip Yoakum, an opponent of Mr. Clinton whom she knew from Arkansas business circles. He insisted that she make her accusations public. She refused.

Five years later, she said, she was approached by lawyers for Paula Jones, a former Arkansas state employee whose sexual harassment suit against Mr. Clinton was settled last year. Mrs. Broaddrick rebuffed them. ''I just didn't want to drag my family through this,'' she said.

On the advice of her lawyer, Bill Walters, a Republican state senator, she agreed to let him call a friend of his, Bruce Lindsey, White House deputy counsel, she said. After the call, the President's lawyer, Robert S. Bennett, faxed Mr. Walters an affidavit another woman had used to deny involvement with Mr. Clinton. She said Mr. Walters changed the names and facts and Mrs. Broaddrick signed it on January 2, 1998. Contacted yesterday, Mr. Lindsey and Mr. Bennett would not comment.

The affidavit read, in part, ''These allegations are untrue and I had hoped that they would no longer haunt me, or cause further disruption to my family.''

After the Lewinsky matter surfaced, she said she started to get calls from reporters, but she refused to comment. Then she heard that prosecutors in the office of Mr. Starr were going to approach her. She discussed her options with her husband and her son, Kevin Hickey, a lawyer, and they decided she could not lie to Federal investigators.

She recounted most of her story to F.B.I. investigators for Mr. Starr, breaking down when she got to the physical details and going no further. She made it clear that no one from the White House had ever tried to pressure her to stay silent.

Around Thanksgiving of last year, Ms. Broaddrick said, she was contacted by Representative Asa Hutchinson, an Arkansas Republican who was one of the House impeachment managers. He was interested primarily in what happened after the attack. She told him that there had never been any overtures of bribery or intimidation from the White House.

The white-hot partisanship surrounding the impeachment debate ensured that details of Mrs. Broaddrick's charges ricocheted around Capitol Hill, where about a dozen Representatives went to examine the detailed account that Mrs. Broaddrick, then known as ''Jane Doe No. 5,'' gave to House investigators. It also ricocheted around the World Wide Web.

Several organizations, including The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, carried brief news accounts of the Congressional interest in the allegations of Jane Doe No. 5, without any details.

In late January, Lisa Myers, an NBC reporter, arrived in Little Rock with her producers and camera crew. Soon after the Internet gossip Matt Drudge began putting out taunting reports on his Web site that NBC was having cold feet about broadcasting the piece. Fox News reported on the NBC interview and on at least one occasion the anchor Brit Hume wore a ''Free Lisa Myers'' lapel button on the air.

On Jan. 30, the CNN show ''Reliable Sources'' included a discussion of the status of the NBC interview. Robert Bartley, the editorial page editor of The Wall Street Journal, saw the show and decided to send Dorothy Rabinowitz, one of his columnists, to see if she could interview Mrs. Broaddrick. She wrote a lengthy article, which was published on The Journal's editorial page, one of the nation's most conservative and a strident critic of Mr. Clinton. The Journal's Washington bureau chief, Alan Murray, said he first found out about the Rabinowitz article when it was mentioned on Mr. Drudge's web site.

After her piece was published, Ms. Rabinowitz stayed in touch with Mrs. Broaddrick, and eventually convinced her to repeat her story to The Times.

People inside NBC who spoke on condition of anonymity said there were long debates about whether to air the piece but that network executives believed that the interview needed extensive corroboration. One thing that gave them pause was the fact that the father of a corroborating witness, Norma Rogers, had been murdered and that Mr. Clinton pardoned the person convicted of the crime.

In an interview, Ms. Rogers said Mr. Clinton's pardon decision, in 1980, had nothing to do with her corroboration of Mrs. Broaddrick's story.

For months Mrs. Broaddrick had been talking to another reporter, Lois Romano of The Washington Post, off the record. When Ms. Rabinowitz's piece appeared on Friday, Mrs. Broaddrick agreed to let Ms. Romano publish her account as well.

Was publishing an easy call? ''No,'' replied Leonard Downie Jr., the executive editor of The Washington Post. ''We talked it out. Even when we saw the Rabinowitz column, I wasn't certain we'd be publishing the story.''

Mr. Downie added, ''Our aim was to provide the entire story -- a story about something that she had said, that she had told some journalists and some investigators and, a number of years ago, a friend. And the role that the knowledge of that story had come to play in various investigations and various media decisions is the whole story as opposed to a specific accusation by one person 21 years ago with limited corroboration.''

The New York Times also hesitated about publishing the account, because it had not interviewed Mrs. Broaddrick.

''The first thing we did was assign some reporters to learn as much as we could -- about the story, about how it emerged, about its consequences,'' said the managing editor of The Times, Bill Keller.

He added that, ''Even then, we talked long and hard about whether to publish anything. The merits of the allegations are probably unknowable. Legally, it doesn't seem to go anywhere. Congress isn't going to impeach him again. And frankly, we've all got a bit of scandal fatigue.

''But these allegations played at least some small role in the impeachment of a President,'' Mr. Keller said. ''And our readers, who have doubtless encountered the story in other places, are entitled to read our best take on it.''

Late yesterday afternoon, NBC News announced that the Broaddrick interview would be broadcast on ''Dateline NBC'' tonight. ''We were never holding it,'' Andrew Lack, the president of NBC's news division, said of the interview. ''We were working our way through a process that was not completed until today.''

Speaking of the drumbeat of coverage of his network's yet-to-be-broadcast interview, he added, ''It seems that these days so many stories are getting far too much play before their airing.'' He added, ''There seems to be a party line, like an old telephone party line, involving everything you're doing'' in news gathering.